Orphan Nuggets....

[kingswood]

I decided a while ago, after getting sick of digging trash!, that I would only really detect around areas where gold has been found before....but essentially patch hunt. Steer clear of the trash and work the way less detected areas.
Many times I come home after not digging a single hole all day. I dont mind really as any signal tends to be either a hot rock or gold
What amazes me though is finding a bit such as a half grammer, then spending ages looking for the next bit but never to find it!
Does anyone have an explanation of the orphan nugget??....The one lonely piece that seems to have lost its parents??
They say "gold doesnt like to be lonely"....well my most certainty does!
I find that many orphan nuggets that I could start an orphanage :/

 

[Wally69]

The orphan is sitting on some shallower ground and their brothers and sisters are hiding that little bit deeper, just out of detector range.

Glad someone is looking after them O

 

[Anolphart]

... or maybe they've already been adopted?

 

[Heatho]

Or eaten by a bird and oop: out elsewhere.

 

[kingswood]

... or maybe they've already been adopted?

I dont think so...this is like very virgin ground....No dig holes, no trash, no nothing really, just the occasional small nugget...

 

[user 7222]

Orphan nuggets happen... ALOT. It REALLY does your head in trying to figure out why it's alone, so don't try. Just accept the lone gift.

 

[kingswood]

Orphan nuggets happen... ALOT. It REALLY does your head in trying to figure out why it's alone, so don't try. Just accept the lone gift.

Ha ha yeah good point....

 

[Goldtarget]

Makes some sense though doesn't it? Rich ground gets all the attention right through the 3 centuries making a decent orphan that much more isolated.

I remember hearing a pretty good theory about these types of nuggets from a forum member after he snagged 3 nuggets (goldilocks nuggets as he called them 1 small 1 medium 1 large ) in a odd area, but really only effective for that particular location.

Still nice to pick the odd mysterious piece up just to keep the dream alive. Historic large lone nuggets have been recorded since the early days, usually discovered on sheer luck or circumstance, and at some of those sizes it really boggles the noggin as to through what may have occurred for them to appear in such weird places.

 

[RedDirtDigger]

Despite lots of shallow ground in parts of WA, orphan nuggets are everywhere and the same goes for most places. I love it...the rush of anticipation when you find a sizable nugget in a virgin area, the concentration in detecting sharpens.....and then the feeling you get after searching and gridding the larger area for hours without another find.

It happens like this, Australia is one of the oldest continents on earth and much of the land surface in Australia has been above sea level and eroding and exposed to the elements for a few hundred million years, some of WA has been exposed to the elements for more then a billion years. Some of WA has had over a kilometre of land surface removed, in the eastern states its hundreds of metres. So all the gold shedding from reefs has been cradled down on the lowering land surface and spread far and wide. Add in re-burial by sediments and volcanics, uplifts, old paleo stream channels and deep leads with topography being inverted and a host of other factors is no wonder that there are so many random pieces of gold hiding out around the place. cheers RDD

 

[nuggetino]

Well said RDD. My first experience with an orphan nugget was WA. Up to that point the largest piece I'd found in SA or the GT was 2 grams. You can imagine the time I spent scouring the area when a 10 gram nuggie popped out of the gravels in a creek bed in WA. While creeks are almost always full of metal trash I assure everyone there is one creek in WA that is now free of all ferrous/non-ferrous targets for 5 kms of it's length.